My friends are beset with dread. Each day more friends, more dread. No conversation omits sighs, rolled eyes, gestures of helplessness. So do survivors discuss the dying: it can’t be true, this loss, but it is: America is foundering. Floods, enmities, cruelties, mass firings, lies, pillage, the cackle of triumphant greed – each day’s headlines shock the soul. My contemporaries, whatever their politics, used to believe in the durability of our nation, that our system could survive any rogues. No longer. America is as mortal as any of us – we can sicken and die – maybe soon.

We’ve all experienced panic but few Americans, I think, for our nation. Remove America from our assumptions and how to know what to do! Fight? – flee? – fold? If fight, how? If flee, where? If fold, could we face ourselves?

Curiously, I am calm. I’ve panicked plenty – in these missives for more than a decade – jeremiads from rooftops, till my friends begged me to pipe down. I foresaw this catastrophe – in the repulsive person of the Nameless One: why weren’t we waking to our peril!

My present calm I attribute to impotence. There’s little any of us can do but wait and pray. Soldiers in bloody battle must feel this way. What will be will be. Eventually the war will end – in defeat or victory, who knows, they will feel much alike. If spared, we’ll begin picking up the pieces, figuring out what’s next. But for now all we can do is hold on tight – and ruefully repeat our King Lear: "The worst is not, so long as we can say 'This is the worst'”.

Defeatism and resignation, while they may look alike, are moral opposites. Defeatism gives up without a fight – no use even trying. Resignation accepts its facts – and lives to fight another day. The question my friends keep asking is, What to do today? How best spend the interval between now and Appomattox?

My coaching to myself is to stay calm – if I can – and rejoice – where I can.

Calm is a gift to those around you. Rudyard Kipling, albeit a bellicose imperialist, got it right in his great poem, “If”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIf you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…

(What a composer Kipling! – his politics notwithstanding.)

Chances to rejoice are ample and everywhere – but first I must haul my attention away from the putrid headlines. Read a poem instead of yesterday’s atrocities. Listen to music. Swim with the grandkids. Tousle the dog. Ban the bad news from bedtime to safeguard my dreams. Try not to wince and groan.

Is this the ostrich option – cowardly evasion? I view it as a survival tactic. To deploy tomorrow we must keep sane today. We must remind ourselves what this war is about. It’s not about defeating our enemies; it’s about reclaiming what’s precious about the American experiment. Equality, Justice, Truth, Decency, Civility, Community, Beauty are candles to rekindle however bleak the night.

No civil war has a happy ending. Victory doesn’t feel like victory when your brother’s the victim. The damage from this Civil War will long outlive its combatants. This mess is unspeakably sad. But there are reasons to be glad, damn it. Hallelujah or to hell with us.